I've started moving my writing over to Medium, for many reasons. I've thought long and hard about it, and I'll expand upon all that later. But for now, head over to medium.com/@cityofsound.

I've set up four main 'channels', or publications in Medium-speke, to organise the work.

This seemed like a good high-level organisation of the things I've frequently written about here over the last 15 years or so. Indeed, long-time readers will probably even recognise their frequently referenced titles. Not everything fits there neatly, but the descriptions below should give you a sense of how and why the writing has been categorised.

A chair in a room / Concerning the design of interactions, things and experiences. Title via Eliel Saarinen: ”Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context — a chair in a room...”

But what was the question / Essays and journal entries concerning technology and the city. Title lifted from Cedric Price’s “Technology is the answer. But what was the question?”

I am a camera / Reflecting on places, often cities. The title is lifted from Christopher Isherwood: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

I'm not moving everything I've written here, by a long chalk. That would be as unnecessary as it would be tiresome. Rather, I'm selecting the pieces I think may be worth reproducing there. This site will still exist—I don't want broken links—but in moving the selected articles across, I've taken the liberty of fixing up a few things (links, references, reflections) and in particular, exploited Medium's ability to handle large images.

It'll take me a long time to tidy everything up here which, as usual, will be done in the wee small hours, so bear with me. But in the meantime, I hope you find the new place useful, enjoyable. If you do, please hit the 'recommend' button at the bottom of Medium articles, so that others may find them too. Cheers.

My latest column for Dezeen addresses robotics and cities. I'd started writing this months ago, and some of the examples betray that. Still, it took me that long—usually on planes, trains but not yet autonomous automobiles—to find the time to edit it down. As usual, you can read the longer original cut below; the tighter Dezeen version is over here.

This one emerged from several conversations over the last year or two, so thanks to Matt Ward and his brilliant team and class at Goldsmiths College for helping me develop the 'shepherd, sheepdog' idea. Thanks to Noah Raford and Matt Cottam and his brilliant team at Tellart for making that manifest at Museum of the Future. Thanks also to conversations with Indy Johar, on and off-stage at MakeCity Berlin, for helping me realise the implicit slavery angle a little more directly. Thanks also to Chris Green for the conversations about drones, rooftops and more besides.

The shepherd and the sheepdog

The image of a standard-issue bus driving through a standard-issue Chinese city flitted across Twitter. Utterly unremarkable at first glance, a closer look revealed the driver was kicking back, arms outstretched above his head as the bus rolled forward by itself. The image was of a trial of self-driving buses developed by the Yutong corporation, due to be running in Chinese cities within the next few years. Perhaps the driver was day-dreaming about whether he’d have a job this time next year.

These are welcome moments amidst the ever-increasing noise around autonomous vehicles, shifting the narrative away from different forms of private car and towards the idea of on-demand, shared autonomous fleets as a form of public transport, something I’ve written about here before. (It’s also good to see some of the spotlight briefly wrestled away from California, onto a different set of cultural dynamics.)

Yutong’s grainy images also give us a clearer idea of what our brave new robot future will look like, its natural habitat being the humbly mundane, everyday urban infrastructure of buses and bins, fridges and façades, wetlands and window-cleaners. This is quite different to the previous popular imagination of robotic buses, which tended to feature placeholder characters like Johnny Taxi, the humanoid robot-driver in ‘Total Recall’ who had an unfortunate altercation with the future Governor of California.

In reality, Johnny Taxi was a ferrying red herring: the bus itself is the robot, not the surrogate ‘driver’. Robots are more like infrastructure than actors. Despite Arnie’s best efforts.

Sam Jacob’s brilliant recent article for Uncubed explores this idea of robot as infrastructure rather than character, suggesting that the logical, or illogical, conclusion of the smart city—of AI, of robotics and autonomous systems, of algorithmic governance—is that “the city itself is a distributed robot”, the implication being a subjugation to the corporate forms of governance culture that produce many of the visions around urban tech.

Jacob’s article is a necessary corrective to some of the unthinking hype around robotics, and a broadside against the lazier end of smart city theory and practice. It can be imbibed alongside a dose of the leaked video of the ‘self-parking’ Volvo that drove straight through its watching researchers, perhaps on its way to a parking space that the car briefly judged to be of greater import.

Usman Haque discussed this #epicfail at FutureEverything Singapore recently, noting that it’s shocking precisely because of this visceral depiction of trust; the people in the video simply don’t react as the car drives at pace towards them, so confident are they that the code is right.

Projects like Superflux’s Drone Aviary at the V&A also sketch out this unthinking sleepwalk into encoding urbanism into robotics, deploying autonomous drones, whose twitching physicality becomes a tangible expression of network culture.

These are all powerful critiques, to be absorbed, dwelled upon, and then … how about embodied in urban design practice? Could we explore the possibility that the ‘city as distributed robot’ has potential as well as pitfalls? Could it possibly elicit a set of heuristics, a way of foregrounding that potential, whilst actively avoiding the pitfalls in autonomous systems, using critique to more deliberately sculpt the ‘dark matter’ that directs them?

And can we use the notion of distributed robotics to elicit a design brief about cities today, as well as tomorrow?

"The way we live is rapidly changing under pressure from multiple forces—financial, environmental, technological, geopolitical. What we used to call home may not even exist anymore, having transmuted into a financial commodity measured in square meters, or sqm. Yet, domesticity ceased long ago to be central in the architectural agenda; this project aims to launch a new discussion on the present and the future of the home. 'SQM: The Quantified Home', produced for the 2014 Biennale Interieur, charts the scale of this change using data, fiction, and a critical selection of homes and their interiors—from Osama bin Laden’s compound to apartment living in the age of Airbnb."

My working title for this was ‘Fractal domestic’—you'll see why if you read on—but when published it became ‘The commodification of everything’, which is also about right, exploring the different understanding of domestic environment that Airbnb prompts. As usual, there are positive implications of this to flush out, as well as negative ones.

This piece expands upon a pithier version of that earlier thought—we've built a lot of our cities, and value has increasingly shifted from traditional assets to services and experiences, so where is architecture? But it goes on to outline the case that we desperately need architecture (or some future iteration of it) due to the 'civic failure' implied by those shifts; that we need architecture, with its notions of being responsible for for the city (rightly or wrongly, in practice), to step up and engage with how are cities are now being transformed.

The tools, as well as a huge chunk of the value, may be shifting from buildings and hard infrastructure to services and experiences—like Uber, Lyft, Bridj noted here, and this essay focuses more on transport, compared to SQM's focus on Airbnb—hence at least some part of architectural practice needs to move on from having buildings as the only output. The answer to every urban question cannot always be a building, clearly. Whilst buildings may be part of some solutions, there are broader, deeper questions in play—good architects see this, but the practice (from education up) is still not exploring this implied question broadly enough. That's what this piece is probing away at, using technology as one way of opening that up.

I should also point out this is a cracking issue of A+U on 'Data Driven Cities'. A+U is one of the best journals out there; this edition no exception. It contains pieces by Eric Rodenbeck, Léan Doody, John Frazer, Timo Arnall/Jørn Knutsen/Einar Sneve, Usman Haque, Alistair Parvin, Geeta Mehta and several others.

It was an honour either way. But it was particularly an honour to be asked to contribute a piece to Architectural Design journal (known as ‘AD’ in the trade) as I was proposed by guest editor Leon Van Schaik. Leon is professor in architecture at RMIT University in Melbourne (where I’m an adjunct prof.) and a huge influence on architects and architecture in Australia, and well beyond. Leon has, for a couple of decades, shaped the evolution of the city of Melbourne itself, via his design, curation, and stewardship of the university’s buildings programme, which he's strategically used as a lever to also enable a generation of brilliant Melbourne architects to emerge, each given the chance to work on significant institutional buildings through that innovative procurement strategy (there are a couple of books about that.)

So although I was asked to write about ‘pop-ups’, which I was not particularly inclined to do, the fact I was asked by Leon meant I had to. I was no fan of ‘pop-ups’ per se—for similar reasons as others—yet I felt I could reinterpret the brief a bit. But it also meant I probably had to write about Ravintolapäivä again, which again, I wasn't particularly inclined to do, having written quite enough about that already (one, two, three.)

Writing the article did get me into interesting new territory though—the idea of ‘fast and slow urbanism’ (which I’d also developed for a talk at an event in Copenhagen about the future of Nordic urban planning.) I ended up writing about the value of buildings as ‘slow urbanism’, as the opposite of popups’ ‘fast urbanism’, with the value of the latter being a kind of sketchbook for the city, revealing latent desires. I saw the possibility of the strategic designer in drawing a link from one to the other. Unpacking this further, as I have done recently, it becomes a way of thinking about governance, and design and planning strategy, in the city, suggesting value in both fast and slow layers of change (fast being things like software and much tech, events, temporary structures and spaces and slow being things like buildings, hard infrastructure and some institutional layers.) Both have value; you just have to be aware of both, of how to handle both, and to know what mode you're in when doing so.

I used the work that Bryan Boyer and I led, with our colleagues in Helsinki—‘learning from Ravintolapaiva’, and then our Open Kitchen project—as a case study. Huge credit to my colleague Bryan there, and others at in the Strategic Design Unit at SITRA (Marco Steinberg, Justin Cook, Kalle Freese and Maija Oksanen), as well as our culinary collaborators Antto Melasniemi and Elina Forss, and our highly supportive partner at City of Helsinki, Ville Relander, who was their food culture project manager at the time. (And now doing other great things in Helsinki, as I discovered over breakfast at The Cock the other day.)

Around this time last year, at the family home in Brisbane, in the jetlagged early hours of what was ostensibly a holiday, I wrote a set of articles for three architecture-oriented publications—a magazine, a journal and a book—all concerning the dynamics of contemporary technologies and how they may affect architecture and urbanism, and more importantly, cities.

The book was 'SQM: The Quantified Home', Space Caviar (ed.), Lars Muller Publishers (2014) and it concerned some of our shifting understandings of domestic space, taking Airbnb as a pivot for that. The articles were for Architecture + Urbanism (aka A+U) magazine and Architectural Design (aka AD) journal, and they covered a broader urban perspective.

An off-cut of all that was the germ of a subsequent Dezeen column on transport startups, and the longer edit was eventually posted here: 'Clockwork City, Responsive City, Predictive City and Adjacent Incumbents'. That discussed the early impact of Uber in particular—though also the potential impact of autonomous vehicles and predictive analytics—and their disruptive rewiring of urban mobility without without owning any of the traditional asset classes in mobility (vehicles, roads etc.) It talked about the fact that Uber-like services could equally be set up by public transit agencies; about the perhaps more interesting Bridj, developing data-driven services in the gaps left by a hub-and-spoke transit model; and many other things including Ancient Egyptian Nileometers, Nairobi's Matutus, and California's so-called ideologies. It was also the backdrop for a few comments around 'peak car' that I made at the end of a later Guardian article around 'mobility as a service', a nice piece written by Stephen Moss.

You can find links to the essays below, but first a bit of post-hoc context.

I asked them to work with us on a visualisation 'device' for data about London, principally the real-time air quality data that we're getting from our Sensing Cities project, which is a collaboration focused on low-cost sensors with Intel ICRI, Royal Parks, Enfield London Borough Council, Lend Lease and Southwark Council, amongst others.

Understanding that approach implicitly, After the Flood rapidly developed a productive way forward, similarly based on an exploration of how to bend geography yet with the focus on revealing various packets of data at borough-level, without losing the sense of that borough's place within the city.

This short project uses film to sketch out some possibilities of contemporary technologies such as wearables and Internet-of-Things, in order to imagine new user experiences for cyclists. It’s covered in depth at Dezeen and elsewhere, so feel free to read about it over there. Below, a few background notes from me, unpicking some of the thinking (though we also do that on our research blog.)

While some of our projects involve more directed development of technologies in place—e.g. last year's Cities Unlocked, which was an end-to-end demonstration of a working system for wearable wayfinding—in this mode we're sketching. We were driven by the particular challenge of wayfinding for cyclists, given that our streets have been designed with cars and other motor vehicles in mind for the last half-century or so, and the signage with it (as good as Kinneir & Calvert’s work is, of course, stand in the street and look at what’s provided for car drivers versus pedestrians and cyclists.) Meanwhile, many pedestrians are looking down at their hands, staring a little blue dots on a map. But what might cyclists need? And what could we do once the street itself start ‘talking’ to people, to services? (In that sense, this project also picks up the threads from on our earlier collaboration with BERG, and their Pixel Track physical prototype for connected displays.)

In both of these kinds of projects—demonstrators and sketches—we're trying to make tangible the promise of otherwise abstract ideas like 'Internet of Things' (IoT) or 'smart cities'. To some extent it's an exercise in envisioning a possible future; albeit the future just around the corner. But the film attempts to locate that future in the everyday, to enable folks like transport infrastructure providers or technology companies to understand how they could work together to improve the 'user experience' of cycling. While suitably open, and non-prescriptive, it gives us a token to have those conversations with.

We're often in dialogue with major transport providers—Transport for London, Transport for Greater Manchester, Network Rail, the RTA in Dubai, the MTA in New York—to better understand their challenges, and we know that cycling has so many circular benefits for cities and citizens. And indeed many cities are spending serious money, time and attention on improving the 'hard infrastructure' of cities to make cycling safer, more convenient, more attractive. (Transport for London are due to spend £800m+ on cycling infrastructure over the next decade.)

Yet as well as this investment—and clearly significant attention to such hard infrastructure is key, preceding any conversation elicited by this film— there is still the potential of a soft infrastructure which can be overlaid on existing urban fabric to further support cycling, which could take advantage of contemporary technologies such as wearables, IoT, real time sensor data, and so on. Part of our job is making it easier to grasp that potential, partly in order to pull more focus onto the importance of improving the experience of cycling generally (using this as bait, in that sense) as well as exploring how entirely new experiences might manifest themselves. As well as transport providers we also talk to tech companies, from startups to multinationals, to understand what's viable here, and what their interests are too. Films like this can help suture these various perspectives together into a coherent set of possibilities.

The product launch of the early 21st century is a well-honed little drama. It’s become as streamlined and archetypal as the automobile launches of the mid-1950s, half-dressed girls running their fingers down the fins of a Cadillac; at least before Don Draper et al put that to bed in favour of the television age’s saccharine-soaked short films.

Now it’s the staged simulcast. It’s in California. A wide, deep stage, generally comprising black nothingness in order to foreground a giant video display and a single figure, a charismatic yet casually-dressed CEO. The CEO stands before a crowd of lanyarded acolytes, most of whom know exactly what they’re here for, yet feign surprise with a volley of whoops and cheers exactly on cue, as if press embargoes are hardwired into their tonsils. A few in-jokes, a few geek jokes, before portentous music heralds a well-crafted product video, loitering with intent over the sleek facets of a beautifully engineered object.

But last Thursday night’s launch was different. It wasn’t for an iPhone or a Hololens or a Chromebook. It was for a battery.

The primary interface between the UK’s planning system and the people and places it serves is a piece of A4 paper tied to a lamppost in the rain. OK, not always rain. But rain often enough.

The paper is a public notice describing a planning application for some kind of ‘development’ somewhere in the vicinity. If it’s a significant development, and very close to your property, you may also get a notification in the post. However, this bit of A4 paper, via the local council, is essentially the only attempt to communicate how a neighbourhood may be about to change.

For something as fundamental as this—how your actual, physical neighbourhood may change—it seems little more than a token gesture. There could be few more important urban interactions, potentially; and yet this is our best attempt to garnering your attention, your input. You’re supposed to read it and get in touch if you want to discuss the development. Implicitly, that means if you want to object to the development, and as such, It’s an interface largely geared around a negative impulses (the opposite of Brickstarter's starting point) Given that, the more conspiratorial amongst you will suggest that a token gesture is the point.

The paper notices are ubiquitous, tied at eye level in well-trafficked places. Yet they are also effectively invisible, largely ignored by all and sundry. They are the lonely, silent messengers of a planning system that is also effectively invisible—until you happen to be caught on the wrong side of it, or are trying to get something through it— yet is still supposed to be the primary way that we engage with collectively shaping our cities.

If one did notice the notice, you’d find language which is often alarmist (Camden lead with HOW DOES THIS AFFECT YOU?, which immediately gets the conversation off on the wrong foot. “How does WHAT affect me?!” “Something’s going to affect me?!”) Or else largely impenetrable. Or the detail is insufficient; there are never any drawings, photos or models (presumably not allowed within the current legislation.)

For the last year, I’ve been collecting examples of planning notices in the wild, most of them collated into the accompanying video. Making a video is clearly an absurd thing to do, but somehow it felt appropriate.

I seem to be the only person even looking at the notices, never mind filming them. I’ve begun to feel almost sorry for them; at least, as much as one can for a bit of paper. The lucky notices get laminated; most fade or disintegrate over time, eroded by weather and lack of attention, before slipping down to the pavement, where their final audience can only be dogs, foxes, rats.

A particularly interesting example near our kids' school, where plastic bags holding the notices have filled with water, which is warming and cooling daily, creating the conditions for life whilst dissolving the notices from the bottom-up. They may be developing new cultures in there, a new micro-neighbourhood, a form of inadvertent permitted development.

The video captures the variety of notices—a largely unnecessary variety, it must be said, given the inherent consistency of the regulation—and the environments they’re in. Mostly London, Manchester, Newcastle. Mostly lampposts. Sometimes tied to notices about picking up dog waste. What it can’t really show is the subject of the notices, which range from the introduction of sliding doors to a major, multi-storey housing development. The same piece of paper, posted up in the same numbers, either way. Here's a set of photos.

(Aside: the soundtrack is Philip Glass’s ‘String Quartet No. 3 (Mishima): VI. Mishima/Closing’, performed by Kronos Quartet. It had the right plaintive quality. Hopefully the rights holders will understand the context and spirit it’s being used in; either way, it’s from ’Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass’ (Nonesuch, 1995) and you should buy a copy.)

The notices seem forlorn emblems of a system that is now completely out of kilter with contemporary cultures, whether business, community or civic. These pieces of paper are the physical suggestion of opaque processes, paper-based interactions, lengthy delays, bureaucratic obfuscation, unclear strategies, community-led NIMBYism as much as developer-led circumvention, and more besides. Perhaps this implied negative weight is one reason why people subconsciously ignore them. To coin a phrase, they are the matter that signifies the dark matter of the planning system.

Yet it is just as likely that the peripheral vision registers them as adverts or missing cat posters as much as anything, and filters out accordingly. To hope that people will simply notice the notice seems lazy and irresponsible, given the numerous communication options available to us. Our planning systems do little to reflect an age in which many people (in this country) are almost constantly connected; increasingly using social media to interact around about shared concerns, increasingly around complex aggregations of urban issues.

The connected street is laden with alternative possibilities for such communications. Various networked technologies enable the previously mundane sentinels of the street—lampposts, traffic lights, benches, sensor boxes, building facades, bus-stops, bike racks, signage—to become more active interfaces for conversations and interactions, for data and augmented projections of what might be. Here is a space where the Internet of Things might genuinely thrive. Here is a possibility of a new, interactive form of street furniture, in the grand tradition of David Mellor, Kinneir and Calvert and Design Research Unit, yet reimagined for the networked age, by marrying interaction design with architecture, industrial design with urban planning, code with urbanism. Token gestures become gestural tokens. A more holistic approach wouldn’t necessarily mean completely relegating paper, or relying solely on smartphones, but would involve numerous touchpoints orchestrated to coherently work together, whether e-ink, AR or equivalent. And yes, probably paper at some point too.

For it’s not the materiality of paper that's an issue. Just as the planning notice was intended to stand for the unseen mechanics of the planning system, the notice now evidently also betrays a lack of thought, care and investment from those responsible for the planning system. These ignored bits of paper represent the state of planning, as a practice and service, as much as anything else, the lack of institutional interest in designing a system that actually works for today and tomorrow.

Planning is far more than simply communicating decision-points. It involves complex trade-offs, from carbon to economic development to heritage and cultural identity, never mind the small matter of local politics. It involves long-term decisions, with hard material outcomes. These are things that are not exactly easy to convey at a glance in the street, or via a 'Like' button. They do not just submit to idle design fictions of what planning could be. Whilst it would be enjoyable to reimagine the planning notice, redesigning the planning system itself is rather more important*

Yet, given what we now understand about strategy and design, starting with the interactions in the street and working up from there may be the best approach to take.

At this point—when, after all, we can land a probe on a comet in space, and more besides—we can surely do better than our primary interface for engaging our citizens in city-making being a piece of paper tied to a lamppost in the rain.

* In terms of that broader redesign, the Brickstarter project we did at SITRA’s Strategic Design Unit in Helsinki collated a lot of thinking. Finn Williams and David Knight’s Sub-Plan would be obvious precursors, as would the newer approaches of Spacehive et al, as well as alternative models for planning-related discussion, from Chile’s Hybrid Forums to Renew Newcastle to Switzerland’s baugespann. Each of these has physical interaction points as well as digital; each questions the scale of a decision (who needs to know, and who needs to decide and how, what happens in a neighbourhood, a district, a city?) and each explores different ways for decisions to be communicated, developed, discussed, recorded.

One of the many quirky delights of the Melnikov House in Moscow is this internal intercom system. Two holes on the ground floor corridor. The right speaks to a tube on the top floor, the left to the entry on the street, in a prototypical door-entry system. (The left isn’t working, apparently, but will do again one day.) These holes simply snake up through the walls to the studio, and down under the ground, out to the street. They are simply metal tubes, carrying the voice.

It’s like the old idea of two tin cans joined by string, yet replacing the string with a tin can extruded to become the entire length of the system.

At the top of the house, the other end. A large metal tube rises up out of the floor in the corner of the studio, with a ‘speaker’ on it.

On the mezzanine above, another hole to speak/listen into.

It’s as simple as could be, and its affordances are entirely clear. Speak into the hole. Listen to the hole.

It is very low power. In fact, no power. And certainly resilient, save a small rodent crawling into a pipe and staying there. It is seamful—perhaps not particularly beautiful seams, but seamful nonetheless—and thus entirely in keeping with Constructivist/Functionalist principles.

In an age of contingent smart home systems, and IoT-enabled domestic infrastructures, I admire the way these snaking tubes simply reach for humble physics, the resilience of their dependence on sound waves and hard surfaces, subtle enhancements to living baked into the building. Learning from 1927.